Relationship loss is an inevitable aspect of life. We lose relationships all the time due to circumstances beyond the control of ourselves and those with whom we have relationships. There is also a type of relationship loss that is deliberately initiated: the termination or break-up. This occurs when one or more participants in a relationship decide that the relationship is over and should be discarded. The discarded relationship may or may not be replaced by a new relationship. For example the board members of an organization may decide to terminate their relationship with a badly behaving high profile sports person or celebrity, but may rectify a personal relationship with this person in the future upon improving their behavior.

So I couldn’t let Bakes have all the movie going fun. This month provided his wealth of knowledge into the horror film realm with four installments of his “Horror Movie Work Week.” Find them here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and Halloween Night Addition #4. Bakes, you covered a lot of film…A LOT. So I’ll just dabble in your area of expertise (as I often like to do in other topics as well) and put a spin on it in our first crossover column. So my pick for the month (well it’s November 1st so celebrate The Day of the Dead) is the Thai film Shutter directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom. When in Thailand…get spooked by the Thai.

Phuket, Thailand – Firewalkers, facial piercings, fireworks and acrobats. How could one know that being a vegetarian could be so exciting? At least the Chinese-Thais in Phuket make it so during their annual Vegetarian Festival in the ninth month of their calendar year. This year of the dragon provided no disappointments in the festival either. The fest takes place the second to third week in October with the dates in this Roman Calendar year being 10th-23rd. Arriving in Phuket for the last five days and six nights provided insight into the ritual, photo ops to drool over, memories to last a lifetime and the desire to come back for more.

Shawn: Really? Ok, the fact that we have to wait a year for the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad isn’t a surprise – back before season four when AMC – brainiacs – almost dropped the show and finally settled with the creators on ordering a final sixteen episode season I knew – everyone KNEW – that AMC would pull a “Sopranos” and split it in two. But after witnessing the moment I have been waiting for since Walt walked into Tuco Salamanaca’s and had his distinctive, then not-yet named Heisenberg visage recorded on a security system I’ve known – again, we’ve all KNOWN – it was going to come down to Walt vs. Hank. And so now, here it is: Walt has a change of heart, or maybe better said comes back down to earth from Tony Montanaville* but now it’s too late. All along during Walter’s transformation we’ve seen that he has a serious problem with hubris and it makes a wonderful kind of sense that after everything, all the crazy close calls and chaotic madness, it would be such a simple, stupid mistake stemming from that hubris that would topple him in the end.

Two new shows on evening television, “Touch” and “Perception”, explore the idea of what it means to be gifted in modern society. In “Touch”, a young boy named Jake never speaks and is diagnosed with autism. The state is trying to place him in a special home for children with his disability. The father, played by Keifer Sutherland, isn’t satisfied with this and in his quest to keep his son, stumbles across Danny Glover’s character who has studied children like Jake. Danny Glover describes Jake’s world and says he can see connections between people the same way that nature applies the Fibonacci rule. That is, he sees connections between people, places, and events in the same way we notice the diamond pattern on the husk of a pineapple. The father is later able to communicate with his son using numbers as codes which leads him on adventures affecting characters across the globe.

So I recently as some of you know celebrated a birthday. I’m the south side of the 30’s now, but thank you for the well wishes I’m sure. A few people told me to not worry because age is just a number. To which I say is true, but a number is a unit of measurement. So what does it measure?

Pre(r)amble: Ah, Las Vegas, to call the monster by the name we’ve given it. I don’t really gamble, and the spectacle of this city wore off after about my third visit, consequently I have come to the conclusion that this city is boring as hell without something to help me ‘plumb the depths’ so to speak. Maybe that’s my Hunter S. Thompson complex I wear from time to time. Anyone who reads this who is familiar with his work will no doubt see that in some respects I am ‘channeling’ or perhaps more harshly yet maybe accurately stated, ‘trying to be like him’ here. That’s fine. I believe Thompson was akin to a William S. Burroughs, a Timothy Leary or a Douglas Rushkoff – an important cultural archeologist. What’s more I truly believe there is something to his courage in taking hallucinogenic drugs and waddling full bore into the middle of the most insane city in America on a quest for the phantom of the american dream. This article will be about one of the things I have found while communing with Psilocybin in that city, and trying to later make sense of what exactly that discovery – if it is indeed a discovery – means in the context of understanding ourselves, our planet and where exactly we fit in the food chain within this strange, unpredictable Universe.